In this episode of the Facility Focus Podcast, I sit down with Willem De Cock, a hospitality and corporate-catering strategist based in Marbella, Spain. Willem spent roughly 15 years running five-star hotels across Bahrain, Egypt, Madeira, Amsterdam, and Belgium before turning to the world of large-scale corporate catering. For the last four years, he's worked independently helping some of the biggest companies in Europe rethink how they feed their people. We dig into the part of workplace dining almost nobody talks about: flow.
We cover the science of free-flow restaurant design, why a poorly built dining room is far harder to fix than a bad menu, how AI and data are reshaping catering, and why the way companies write their catering tenders may be working against them. Willem also shares the story of how his own software, CaterFlow, outsmarted him solving one bottleneck only to reveal another he never would have caught on his own.
This is a must-listen for facility managers, building engineers, and contractors who want to understand how workplace dining really works, and why it has quietly become one of the biggest levers for bringing employees back to the office.
In this episode, we cover:
00:00 – How Willem Got Started in Hospitality
02:36 – The Classic Hotel Management Path
03:32 – From Consultant to Software Founder: CaterInsight & CaterFlow
04:57 – Why Companies Need to Own Their Catering Data
05:45 – Cater Profile & the Power of Flow
06:52 – Cafeteria Lines vs. Free-Flow Design
07:53 – Moving 1,250 People in 90 Minutes
08:37 – When Bad Flow Costs You (and Kills Dessert)
10:01 – Designing for the "Netflixer" Generation
11:51 – How CaterFlow Collects & Simulates the Data
14:57 – When the Software Beats the Expert
15:50 – Architects, Kitchen Builders & Licensing the Tool
17:14 – The Biggest Inefficiency: A Lack of Data
19:12 – Why a Company Restaurant Is "Like a Marriage"
20:25 – Cutting Waste by Rethinking the Daily Menu
22:14 – How Lunch Brings Employees Back to the Office
24:15 – Why Catering Is So Hard for Facility Managers
26:50 – Choosing a Caterer Who Takes You from A to B
29:46 – Caterers, Suppliers & the Logistics Equation
30:53 – Subsidized Food: Profit vs. Break-Even
33:11 – A Magic Wand for the Future of Catering
35:25 – Favorite Project: When CaterFlow Outsmarted Him
37:21 – Rapid Fire: Restaurants, Coffee & Scripted Service
42:37 – Books, Cuisine & What FMs Should Measure
Willem De Cock is a hospitality and corporate-catering strategist based in Marbella, Spain. The son of an expat engineer, he grew up traveling the world before training at hotel school in Switzerland and spending some 15 years in five-star hotels across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. He then moved into large-scale corporate catering, where he has spent the last 25 years in operations, innovation, and strategy. Through his consultancy he now advises major companies and caterers, and is the creator of CaterInsight and CaterFlow - data and AI tools that help organizations understand, benchmark, and optimize their workplace dining.
https://aloha-caterflow.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willemdecock/
Presented by: New Standard Cleaning
New Standard Cleaning provides commercial janitorial services to the Chicagoland area, specializing in after-hours cleaning programs for facilities across a wide range of industries.
Their mission is to safeguard health and elevate the image of every space through customized cleaning programs and consistent service.
Learn more: www.newstandardcleaning.com
Connect with us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/facility-focus-podcast
